Music and Fashion

The most visible musical fashions are those we dance to, and dance steps come and go as fashion dictates. Queen Elizabeth I created a scandal when she danced the volta. The waltz, though it now seems unlikely, was also once considered outrageous. Andrew Ford asks are the biggest fashions in dance also always the dirtiest?

Throughout history the church has inspired and probably paid for more music than any other establishment. But what sort of music is appropriate for God? Even if we believe God to be unchanging, religious music has been as subject to fashion as any other sort of music. Andrew Ford considers these changes, from mediaeval times to the present.

Fame isn't always linked to talent. Youth and beauty help. So does being blind (eg Andrea Bocelli) or mentally disabled (eg David Helfgott). Death is the ultimate career break for some, think Hendrix and Eva Cassidy, but death can also lead to musical obscurity: Bach's music might have been lost forever if it hadn't been resurrected years later by Mendelssohn.

Nostalgia might be the very opposite of fashion, but it creates new fashions. Nostalgia for a time when the world still had style leads to cocktail drinking and Diana Krall. Did such times ever really exist?